Trump Supporters Are Stepping Up Their Attacks On Bob Mueller And The FBI

As the special counsel invewstigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election draws closer to President Donald Trump's inner circle, the president's supporters have launched an aggressive effort to undermine Robert Mueller and the legitimacy of the nation's premier law enforcement agency, painting the FBI as a hotbed of liberal activists bent on taking Trump down.

The
extraordinary attacks on the FBI and of Mueller, a well-respected
former law enforcement leader who is also a registered Republican
appear intended to set the stage for Trump to fire the special counsel,
whose team has already secured charges or guilty pleas from four Trump
associates.

Trump denied on Sunday that he planned to fire Mueller, just as he’d said he wouldn’t fire James Comey, the former FBI director Trump dismissed in May.
But Trump did tell reporters that it was “quite sad” that Mueller’s
team had obtained his transition team’s emails, which were hosted on a
government server.

“Not
looking good. It’s not looking good,” Trump said. “My people are very
upset about it. I can’t imagine there’s anything on ’em, frankly,
because as we said, there’s no collusion. There’s no collusion
whatsoever. A lot of lawyers thought that was pretty sad.”

Trump’s
transition team had claimed in a letter to members of Congress that the
General Services Administration, which hosted email services for the
transition team, had “unlawfully produced... private materials,
including privileged communications” to the Mueller team.

Peter
Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, said in a statement to
HuffPost and other outlets that the special counsel team had “secured
either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process” when
they obtained emails in the course of a criminal investigation.

The revelation that Mueller had access to the Trump transition team’s emails was
only the latest fuel for the GOP and conservative attacks on the
special counsel and the bureau. In recent weeks, opponents of the
investigation have focused on text messages that two former members of
the special counsel team exchanged about Trump during the campaign,
before Trump was elected.

The
attacks on Mueller and the FBI have gotten more extreme in recent
days. Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News commentator who recently met with
Trump, called the special counsel investigation a “criminal cabal” and
the FBI a “crime family” and suggested that top ranking bureau officials
should not only be fired, but taken “out in cuffs.”

Fox
News host Jesse Watters hosted a segment calling the investigation
“crocked from the jump,” suggesting to viewers that “we have a coup on
our hands in America.”

Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the clip.

And Fox News hosted a segment with White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, which featured the chyron

“A COUP IN AMERICA?”

The
latest round of attacks came after a House Judiciary Committee hearing
with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last week in which
Republicans repeatedly accused the
bureau of partisanship over the 2016 text messages between two FBI
investigators that disparaged Trump (as well as Democrats like Martin
O’Malley and Bernie Sanders).

FBI
agents are allowed to privately express political views, and the texts
only came to light because the two officials were allegedly having an affair and they exchanged the messages on their work phones, which made them easy for DOJ officials to access.

Officials
in the Justice Department’s press office allowed some reporters on the
DOJ beat to view the text messages ahead of Rosenstein’s testimony last
week, which raised alarms for some Democrats who viewed it as an attempt
to undermine the special counsel probe (from which Attorney General
Jeff Sessions is recused).

In
a statement on Friday, the Justice Department Inspector General’s
office which is leading the probe of the two FBI officials said it
was not consulted about the release of the texts to the media, but had
told officials they did not object to providing the text messages to
Congress.

Ryan
Reilly is HuffPost’s senior justice reporter, covering criminal
justice, federal law enforcement and legal affairs. Have a tip? Reach
him at ryan.reilly@huffpost.com or on Signal at 202-527-9261.

Trump Supporters Are Stepping Up Their Attacks On Bob Mueller And The FBI
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December 18, 2017
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